Justin Elliot has a piece up looking at Sen. John McCain's evolving opinion of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi since visiting him in 2009 to discuss the delivery of "non-lethal" defense equipment to Libya. But the oddest thing McCain said was during an appearance yesterday morning:
Well what we know of them so far obviously are that the former justice minister and others -- and a government has been formed, part of that government. But Gadhafi is a proven quantity. The blood of Americans is on his hands because he was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103. He has been involved in other acts of terror. And by the way it does take time, as it did during the period of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. But we were able to provide them with some weapons and wherewithal to cause the Russians to leave Afghanistan. So we can do it.
Thankfully, McCain isn't in the administration, but you could hardly find a more disquieting example of a hawk failing to learn the perils of training and equipping foreign fighters than the training of the Afghan mujihadeen to fight the Soviets. While CIA money doesn't seem to have gone to Osama bin Laden in particular, it certainly went to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who became one of the main leaders of the insurgency after the U.S. pissed off Iran enough to let him go. America's sponsorship of the mujahideen's fight against the Soviets is certainly part of how Afghanistan ended up with the Taliban government and al-Qaeda ended up with a base from which to conduct its operations against the United States.
The peril of illiberal or extremist forces filling the vacuum in Libya should Gadhafi be ousted is very real. As White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan put it last Friday, "Al-Qaeda has a demonstrated track record of trying to exploit either political vacuums, or political change," adding that "the situation in Libya now will be no exception." While awareness of that danger didn't preclude the administration from intervening, at least they're aware of the threat. McCain seems so unaware of the possibility that something like this could end badly that he's citing one of the stops on the road to 9/11 as an example to follow.
The more recent example of an American-backed intervention that backfired is Somalia. In 2006, an attempt to depose a (moderate by comparison) Islamist government through an American-backed Ethiopian invasion, we ended up with an embattled, vulnerable Islamist government and an empowered al-Qaeda affiliate in Al Shabaab, which has shown an unprecedented ability to draw recruits from the United States.
A major American strategic counterterrorism goal should be to reduce the number of Muslim countries in which America is at war, because terrorist groups have an easier time recruiting when their use of force is framed as a defense of Muslims, rather than an act of murder or revenge.
The White House has defended the intervention in Libya as necessary to stave off a Srebrenica-style massacre on "steroids," but nothing about the potential blowback of this operation should be taken lightly. I'm pretty sure that when the Bush administration tried to depose the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia in 2006, they had no idea that they were putting into motion the events that would lead to the first American suicide bomber.
